2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
I'm working on a multi-session, narrowband 2x6 mosiac. I did a trial integration by panel all the way through to Combine RGB. While the mosiac blend worked ok, I was unhappy with the gradient removal so tried an alternate approach which was stacked and assemble the mosiac by filter (Ha, O3, S2) and then do the combine and light pollution fix. Unfortunately, after successfully processing the Ha lights, APP failed to register and normalize the O3, S2. I've attached screen shots of the error messages and the subs data. Note the NaN values appearing in the quality score.
O3 and S2 have less data at this point than Ha but not sure why that would be an issue. I should note that when I did a traditional stack of all 3 by panel, I didn't have any issues (other than very difficult to remove gradients).
I varied the star setting from 2500 down to 1200 but no impact. Didn't play with other settings at all.
Appreciate any insights. I'm running Beta 32
Thanks, George
Hi George @snapthot,
Thank you very much for reporting your issue.
Indeed,that clearly indicates a problem with registering the O3 and S2 data.
The mosaic registration by panel is much more robust en faster as you have noticed I think. Do I understand correctly that you are now only trying to make the Ha, O3 and SII mosaics individually from all their individual subs?
There is a chance that your O3 and S2 data need some noise reduction in 3) analyse stars to get better star analysis results. Did you try to do 3) analyse stars with the cosmic ray / noise reducer enabled? If not, please try and set the lower area limit to 10 pixels to start with and let me know if all is okay then.
If you want me to have a look at your data, let me know and I will provide upload instructions to have a good look at what is going on here.
Mabula
@mabula-admin Thanks Mabula, will try with the modified settings today and post an update here.
The O3 and S2 data is very thin as I’ve only had a few sessions so far.
BTW: Yes, I’m trying to assemble the mosaic by individual filters to see if I get better results with light pollution/gradient removal. When I built each panel all the way through “combine RGB” and then applied LPC to each panel before assembling mosaic, the results were unsatisfactory (not to confuse things, I’ll start a separate topic on LPC/gradient control for mosaics).
@mabula-admin No joy after making the change on star analysis per your suggestion. I have a scheduled session this weekend, weather and moon permitting, I'll focus on O3 and S2 to balance out the Ha and have more data to process in panels that are short.
I retest and post results; if the NaN reoccurs, I'll need those upload instructions.
Thanks again!
Hi George, @snapthot
Okay, please let me know if I need to look at the data 😉 to make sure things are okay from our end.
Mabula
Finally had a chance to add some more subs to the panels that were very light and upgrade to Beta 35 and the good news is that NaN errors no longer occur
I am having workflow challenges however; in particular, dealing with gradients in each panel showing up in the assembled mosaic. I'll start a specific thread for that discussion.
